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‘Culting’: From Waco to Fundamentalist Mormons

By Catherine Wessinger

…Fuller Theological Seminary, and Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology at Boston University, critiquing assumptions about “brainwashing,” with statements from an anti-cultist with no advanced degrees in the relevant fields of religious studies, psychology, or sociology. Joe Szimhart, a former deprogrammer, now an “exit counselor” and “a cult information specialist for more than 25 years,” was quoted as an authority on “brainwashing.” On April 17,…

Obama’s Muslim Problem—And Ours

By William D. Hart

…ple, to complicate the image of who Muslims are, to accent their long, pre-Boston Tea Party, pre-revolutionary history in America. What better way to exemplify the new politics he claims to embody? Item: Two Muslim women dressed in hijab (a traditional form of dress that leaves only the face and hands exposed) are barred from sitting behind Obama at a campaign rally by over zealous campaign volunteers. The women complain publicly about their ill t…

Has American Conservatism Abandoned the Christian Right?

By Bradley Onishi

…late of similar laws over the past century,” writes Michael Bronski at the Boston Review. “In significant ways, ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws—and obsessions with ‘grooming’ more broadly—are old Christian fears about sin and danger given a new face, and express this by recycling medieval anti-Semitic tropes of the blood libel, simply substituting LGBTQ people for Jews as the supposed threat to children.” In sum, Mr. DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” campaign is not…

What Masterpiece Cakeshop Oral Arguments Suggest About the Future of LGBT Discrimination

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ociety is clearly continuing to wrestle with an issue on which substantial numbers of Americans continue to differ, usually for religious reasons. Masterpiece Cakeshop gets at a number of disputed questions, but regardless of which way the justices rule, others will likely go unanswered. Beginning to thread this needle will likely be the task of Justice Kennedy, who did not tip his hand in today’s arguments about how he intends to reconcile his la…

Make Way for Liberal Pro-Lifers

By Patricia Miller

…tholic hierarchy and the Republican Party. O’Malley told John Allen of the Boston Globe that serious Catholics could no longer “turn a blind eye to the human suffering and the tragedies that are taking place” regarding the treacherous border crossing and the mass deportation of undocumented migrants. He said serious Catholics need to support immigration reform. O’Malley isn’t the first Catholic prelate to suggest that issues beyond abortion are “p…

Why Science Needs “Neurodiversity,” Autism Included

By Andrew Aghapour

…ve. Neurotribes documents how selective, “pyramid” thinking has fostered a number of dangerous theories about autism. It tells the story of Bernard Rimland, a widely-read author who took up a comprehensive review of autism research in 1958 when his son was diagnosed with the syndrome. He was so committed to the hope of a simple cure, however, that he latched onto the theory that autism was the result of a simple glitch in a single metabolic pathwa…

Colonialism and the Crisis Inside the Crisis of Catholic Sexual Abuse

By Kathleen Holscher

…within those dioceses had been named in lawsuits targeting sexual abuse—a number that suggests a far higher per-capita rate of offending clergy than even in New Mexico. In New Mexico, the victims of abuse were mainly Nuevomexicano and Indigenous kids. The abusers were often, but not always, white. Many came to New Mexico from faraway places, but some were local men. Colonialism is a structure that has touched everybody and everything here. It has…

Thanksgivukkah, With a Side of Christmas Envy

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…ot running from the Red Scare. In fact, the mayor of a major American city—Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino—issued a proclamation in honor of Thanksgivukkah. I have deeply ambivalent, uncomfortable feelings about state displays of religion, but you have to feel a bit of awe: the city that won the World Series this year (fear the beard!) is also acknowledging our minor festival. Combining traditions is not a new thing in any religious tradition or cult…

How Trump’s Assertion of “Power to Pardon” Tramples the American Sacred

By Spencer Dew

…ion by committing criminal acts.” As Richard North Patterson writes in the Boston Globe: This is not the case of an unconstrained federal government targeting a private citizen or lower officeholder. Trump is the world’s most powerful man; he can direct — or misdirect — the affairs of our country, then use the unique and awesome powers of his office to immunize his actions. The FBI investigation is all that stands between the rule of law and a pre…

How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…hile that corner of the night sky near NGC 6809 is still pulsing out prime numbers. –Rome, December, 2055 _________ The article that may one day be written about religious responses to E.T. will of course bear little resemblance to the fiction above. But, religion aside, the possibility of confirming alien life is less remote than you might think. On May 21, 2014, Dan Werthimer, scientific director of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life) at…